Sunday, November 19, 2006

APPO announced this morning that the last remaining barricades in the city, which stretch along Periferico about 1/2 mile and Avenida Universidad an equal distance, will be abandoned by the armed gangs now manning them. Tomorrow, according to APPO, their thugs will just, well, walk away. That is actually only about 20 or so.

But

APPO also says that "negotiations" with those manning the barricades have not yet been fully completed. APPO supposes that we believe that the heavily armed APPO warlords cannot just walk up to the lightly armed barricade sappers and say, "AMSCRAY!" What this "negotiations" business really means is that the APPO warlords are negotiating with their sappers their severance pay. They've been paying the thugs on the barricades $200 pesos per day to freeze their butts off. Most have wandered away on their own account, seeking a warm fire somewhere. The remaining hard cases need to be paid off or scared off.

Also, APPO says that "security inside the university is a very complicated matter," whatever that is supposed to mean. APPO had made a big announcement yesterday that it would allow, once again, the university to be opened to students this coming Tuesday (Monday is a holiday celebrating the 1910 Revolution where Mexicans threw off the cloak of Porfirio Diaz tyranny and put on the cloak of the democracy you see in action today . . . ahem).

After long and exhausting but fruitful research into APPO's thinking, Mark in Mexico has discovered the reason behind this latest maneuver in the Hamburger War. I call this the "Hamburger War" because of the APPO attacks on MacDonalds and Burger King. Mexico did engage is a "Pastry War" once. A French pastry shop owner, one Monsieur Remontel, filed a claim for some 60,000 pesos against the government for damages caused by drunken government officials. When the government refused to pay, he complained to the French government. The French invaded Mexico -- over pastries. Which just goes to show you that the French are not, contrary to popular belief, afraid to fight. The fight just has to be on someone else's territory and for a good reason -- cakes and donuts.

It's frikkin' cold, here.

Not only is it unseasonably cold, but it's raining to boot. There are not enough APPO "freedom fighters" willing to suffer through these cool and rainy nights to prevent my 10 year-old from penetrating their iron curtain of hijacked and burned-out buses, trucks and cars.

It may take the city a few days to place this one back into service.

APPO thugs drank all the Pepsi, then re-filled the bottles with gasoline

Now, all of this may seem like good news to the casual observer. Mark in Mexico, casual dresser but no casual observer, is filled with a sense of foreboding. APPO also announced that they would begin "security patrols" of the city's neighborhoods. They will be on the lookout for "criminals and police". That is, APPO still will not allow police to patrol the city.

This doesn't seem like the smartest play in the APPO offensive playbook. If the police do indeed go out into the streets at night, ambushes and firefights could become commonplace. Somehow that thought doesn't make us all feel more, uh, secure. Would it you?